Farmers Nick and Amber Heffernan have created a unique, boutique rural experience on their Junee farm for couples escaping city life.
A converted silo surrounded by fields, sheep and a private outdoor hot tub makes a unique country getaway.
For exhausted couples trapped in the everyday grind of urban living, the idea of somehow being able to pack up and move to the country can be truly aspirational – after all, they don’t make a television show called ‘Escape to the City.’
Of course not everyone is able to achieve the idyll of a tree or sea change, so perhaps the next best thing is to find a weekend away to relax in a hot spa with a glass of champagne beneath the calming, tranquil, starlit night sky of outback Australia.
Sheep, cereal and canola farmers Nick and Amber Heffernan realised the potential to create a unique, boutique rural experience on their Junee farm for couples desperate to simply get away from city life and connect with the country lifestyle – but a country lifestyle with a difference.
Twenty years, ago while shovelling out the flat bottom of the farm’s giant 100-tonne grain silo, Nick began cultivating an idea where this towering, cylindrical Lysaght-steel structure could be transformed into boutique accommodation, taking in the extraordinary farmland views within the Eurongilly valley.
It was a dream that became a two decade-long slow-burn in coming to fruition, culminating in the unveiling last year of The Silos Accommodation – a stunning two level, self-contained showpiece getaway placed with-in an exquisite, architecturally-re-imagined 1960s grain silo.
“We even had the Grand Designs program wanting to feature what we were doing” Nick says of their remarkable undertaking. “But it was never going to be our home, it’s created as unique farm stay accommodation.”
While Nick is unquestionably a local son-of-the-soil farmer – his family having worked the land here for five generations – Amber, a former Wagga-based Theatre Nurse grew up on a river island at Port Macquarie and is now the silo’s overseer.
“Amazingly it took less than a year to build” Amber says of the construction process, proud and seemingly still somewhat in disbelief that their concept has materialised. The entire steel silo had been dismantled and reassembled to the architect’s requirements.
“In the lead-up to the opening last September we had everyone working around the clock to get everything finished. Painters, carpenters …’
And as a result, since the opening the Heffernans have been inundated with bookings – a weekend at the Silo includes an array of locally produce food, beer and wines and for the green-minded, the environmentally friendly accommodation operates completely off grid.
Yet despite the wonderfully whimsical idea of silo accommodation, Nick explains there was an underlying practical decision in committing to what was in reality an astonishingly expensive gamble.
“A major part of our story is that with our son home, we have three generations living off the land now” Nick explains of the decision to renovate the silo. “We needed diversity in our income to sustain it for the future.”
“With rising land prices due to a lot of foreign investment in Australian agricultural land, we’re not in a position to buy more land to expand. We wanted to stop pushing the land to its limit to be able to survive.”
“Caring for our soil is the most important thing we as humans can do – as the current caretakers of the land, we want to leave it in a better state and hopefully future generations can grow on the.”
Originally published as Farmers Nick and Amber Heffernan have created a unique, boutique rural experience on their Junee farm for couples escaping city life.
